Typically, enterprises that are building private clouds on OpenStack hire professional services groups that deploy high-available, load-balanced nodes including blade servers for computing and storage nodes for storage, he said. "But you're not really taking advantage of the elasticity of the cloud," he noted.

With PentOS, users can buy a single class of server and use the software to automate things like running a database that requires high reliability on any server depending on available capacity and hard drive reliability. "We're automating away the reliance on high-availability hardware," he said.

PentOS also automates the installation process. PentOS is packaged onto a USB stick that an administrator can plug into a laptop to configure.

Administrators don't have a lot to choose from when configuring their systems, however. They input the IP (Internet Protocol) range used, select groups of users from Active Directory that should have permissions in the cloud environment, adjust settings around VLANS and configure the switch itself, such as setting administrative passwords for it.

"We tried to make the software as opinionated as possible," he said. "There aren't options around what database would you like to use or hypervisor."